Well, I cannot speak for the others on this list, but I am
southern born and bred.  My ancestors fought, mostly for the
south, mostly in Longstreet's Corps.  Many of them died.  One
of the ones who lived took a bullet during Pickett's charge,
crawled back to the Confederate lines that evening, has his
leg amputated in a field hospital, and lived to tell the
story.  The medal he received afterwards, as a survivor, was
passed down to my father's generation, or at least so I am
told.  Another died at Chickamauga. 

But so what?  I don't really know much about these people. 
They left very few records behind to know them by.  I have
land plats, a family bible, a school note book, a few letters.
 I don't know precisely why my ancestors signed up to fight,
or how they wound up in brigades led by the likes of Armistead
or Robertson.  Some of my ancesters owned slaves, most did
not.  Of the ones who did not, all were related reasonably
closely to someone who did own slaves.  Some no doubt were
bitter racists, and some open minded, decent folk, by our
contemporary standards.  But so what?  Their accomplishments
were not my accomplishments, and their sins were not my sins.
 That is as true of my ancestors as it is of anyone else's
here on this list.

And either way, no matter how reflective or unreflective,
virtuous or venial they were, nothing about them changes the
fact that the war was fought for bad reasons.  There is a huge
difference between the reasons that soldiers fight and kill,
on the one hand, and why their public societies organize to
take them to war, on the other.  My criticisms ultimately are
for the politicians, statesmen, jurists, and intellectuals who
led them to an unjust and ill-considered war, fought for
unjust and ill-considered purposes.    

All best,
Kevin

---- Original message ----
>Date: Wed, 14 Feb 2007 23:22:53 -0500
>From: Sunshine49 <[log in to unmask]>  
>Subject: I just want to say...  
>To: [log in to unmask]
>
>For any of you who are not from the south, or Virginia [since
that's  
>what this list is about], to sit and pontificate and tell us in  
>Virginia and the south what's wrong with us, what you know
about us  
>that is so much more right than what we know about ourselves,
and why  
>we are wrong to think and feel what we do, is as insulting and  
>infuriating to us as it would be if scholars in France and
Brazil and  
>Korea were to sit, backed up by all the volumes they've read
and the  
>papers they've written, the many many references they have
that put  
>Americans in a very bad light [you know they could find
many], and  
>tell us what we are supposed to feel about 9/11 and why we
are wrong  
>to feel the way we do. Let's have a French scholar tell us
how we are  
>supposed to feel about what happened to us on 9/11. And if we
feel  
>otherwise, we are wrong. How would you feel about that?
>
>Nancy
>
>-------
>I was never lost, but I was bewildered once for three days.
>
>--Daniel Boone
>
>To subscribe, change options, or unsubscribe, please see the
instructions
>at http://listlva.lib.va.us/archives/va-hist.html
Kevin R. Hardwick, Ph.D.
Department of History
James Madison University

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